The eyes have it

The long-running "Find your own road" ad campaign for Saab Cars USA is an example of how to bend conventions without breaking them. Most car commercials try to create energy and excitement with a montage of shots of the automobile taken from every possible angle. The Saab commercials use wildly colorful animation of Saabs traversing highways and byways. The print ads pick up on that theme, choosing a painterly representation of the car over the typical car-parked-on-wet-asphalt approach.

In both formats, the ads definitely cut through the clutter. But do they communicate as well? After testing the TV ads, the company thought it might be a good idea to test the print ones too, says Armeen Gould, marketing research manager for Atlanta-based Saab Cars USA. "We had begun testing the TV ads, trying to get a better sense of people's takeaway, how intrusive they were, how effective they were at increasing consideration rates. We also wanted to get a sense of how people were consuming the print ads. What kinds of messages were getting through?

"It wasn't that we were having a problem with the print advertising. We had seen a steady increase in the number of consumer inquiries from the ads. But because the campaign took such an unusual approach, we wanted to make sure people were understanding it was an ad for a car and not something else as they flipped through a magazine," he says.

To find out how its print ads performed, Saab used ENVISION, a testing service that uses in-depth interviews, eye tracking and T-scope measures to assess consumer responses to print advertising or packaging.

ENVISION is a joint venture of Treistman & Stark Marketing, Inc., Hackensack, N.J., and Micromeasurements, Inc., Farmington, Conn. ENVISION's twist on standard packaging and advertising testing is that it aims to speed the development process by allowing marketers to make changes during the research process instead of afterward. Rather than bringing mock-ups of the packaging or advertising to the research site, marketers bring prototypes or finished products on computer files. With the files there, changes can be made to the ad or packaging based on consumer input.

"The ability to make changes and then test reactions to those changes was critical for choosing this methodology," Gould says. "That was one of the things that attracted us to it. We could make changes there, break apart the ad and resize it, change the fonts, the size of the type."

"Oftentimes when you're sitting in the back room of a focus group you say 'I wish we could make some changes to the ad and show them that version.' With ENVISION we can modify the ad and show it to the respondents right away," says Joan Treistman, president of Treistman & Stark Marketing, Inc.

Changes aren't made based on the opinion of one respondent, Treistman says. "When you see an issue come up again and again, you know you have something to deal with. It's the negatives, the barriers, the obstacles to communication that come up the fastest."

Treistman stresses that ENVISION is not a substitute for quantitative testing. "The idea is to find out how we can enhance the execution. We like to use it as phase one to make sure we go into the quantitative phase from a position of strength."

Mini-magazine

The ads that were tested focused on the Saab 900 five-door turbo model. "Visually, the print ads were designed to replicate the look and feel of the television campaign, to be very colorful and whimsical in their approach," Gould says. "We also wanted to drive home some performance messages and talk in greater depth about some of the technical specifications of the car. This particular ad was trying to combine the fact that a five-door turbo was fun to drive, but also had a roomy interior and a large cargo area." The ads invite readers to call a toll-free number for more information about the Saab line.
For a basic ENVISION print ad test, a respondent sits at a computer to view a 15- to 20-page mini-magazine featuring ads and editorial using the eye tracking technology. A technician is there to help them if they have questions. This is followed by a series of closed- and open-ended questions, administered by a moderator, covering unaided recall and a variety of other topics.

"We create mini magazines or, in the case of packaging, realistic store shelves or POS displays so that the designs can be looked at in context. That's key because you end up with a rich set of responses during interviews," says Keith Sherman, president of Micromeasurements, Inc.

For the eye tracking portion of the research, the respondent dons special glasses and places his or her chin on a chin rest to standardize the viewing distance and assure measurement accuracy. An invisible beam of light is directed at the respondent's eye. A camera picks up the beam of light and the technology pinpoints where the respondent's focal point is on the material being viewed. Back room observers can watch a monitor to see where the respondent's eyes go as the material is viewed.

Eye tracking is objective

The value of eye tracking is that it's objective, Sherman says. People don't always know or can't remember what they've looked at. But eye tracking can show you where they've looked. "It gives us a measure of which elements attract attention quickly, and it gives us a measure of readership and what we call the scan path or viewing pattern, the order people view things.

"It lets us find out if people spend too much time on something that's not a high priority and if they're missing key elements. If a person doesn't recall a key tagline, eye tracking tells us if they read it or not. If they don't read it, then you need to modify the graphic to attract their attention. If they do read it and don't recall it, the content needs to be revised."
"Eye tracking allowed us to know if they had actually found the 800 number and the Web address," Gould says. "We could see the parts of the ads they consumed, if they read the body copy and how long they spent reading it. From a back room perspective, there would have been no other way for us to know that."

Unnatural environment

Gould says there were concerns that the eye tracking environment was unnatural. "People had some questions about how legitimate the results were going to be. They felt it wasn't a true representation of the actual magazine reading environment. Unlike TV ad testing, where you can have people sitting in a comfortable chair, somewhat simulating the environment they watch in, it's harder to achieve that in the magazine testing," Gould says.

"When we conceive a research environment," Sherman says, "we simulate the natural features that are critical - the ones that enable us to see and hear how an ad will perform in the real world. That's why, for example, we tested the Saab ads in a mini-version of Sunset magazine, surrounded by competitive ads and relevant editorial content. If we're testing an ad for cake mix we place it in a magazine like Good Housekeeping. If we're testing an ad for financial services we place it in Time or Business Week. Other natural features that are critical to the process include letting respondents look at the mini-magazine at their own pace and re-exposing them to the ad a second and sometimes a third time."

Despite any reservations the agency had going into the research, it recognized the value of the findings and incorporated some of them into the ad. "They've held on to the integrity of the ad but they've made it easier for people to read it all the way through. They've given people who were intrigued about the car a better sense of what the car is like," Treistman says.
For example, the body copy was enlarged and boldfaced to make it more readable. And the toll-free number, which previously was part of the body copy, was placed on a separate line. The photo of the car was enlarged after some respondents said that it seemed too small (especially when the ad mentioned how spacious the car was).

While some respondents felt that the distinctive font used for the headline looked like a child's writing, it worked well with the colorful graphic. "We were not deterred by the people who said it was childlike because we knew it was working," Treistman says. "We learned that the font was a very effective tool to reinforce some of the imagery Saab was trying to get across. It was also very readable, very attention-getting and involving. It had a freestyle feeling that was very relevant to the non-conventional personality that Saab has created."

Test fractionals

Saab also wanted to gauge the effectiveness of some fractional ads it was running in conjunction with the full-page ads. The fractionals, which Saab earned due to a high volume of advertising, contained information on how people could receive an "excursion kit" which contained more information about Saab's line of cars. "We wanted to see if that was the best use of our advertising credits or if we should be using them for other purposes, for example, trying to develop some joint promotional activities with the magazines," Gould says.

Though the research found that respondents didn't always connect the fractional ad with the full-page ad, Saab hasn't stopped using them. "But we did get some clues about how to better tie them with the full page ad, linking the ads with graphics and colors so people could more easily see the connection between the two," Gould says.

Team-building

If egos and territorial instincts allow, the ENVISION approach is designed to foster a team-building atmosphere. "There's a lot of ownership of the outcome because it's been compiled with people from different parts of the company in the same room. Everybody's there seeing it firsthand," Sherman says.

It's important to have representatives from many parts of the company, including marketing, advertising and brand managers, present during the testing, Treistman says. This not only increases ownership of the results but helps (at least ostensibly) the decision making process. "It's our preference to have the creative people from the agency there because the modifications that are made to the packaging or the advertising should be made at the behest of the agency people," she says.

"In a typical focus group, you'd end up going back to the client's office, having a discussion and the client saying, 'We aren't satisfied with main idea communication.' The agency is stuck trying to defend its position. But if we're in the field, we're all there building a more successful ad in the same time period," Sherman says.

Treistman says the service is also designed to save time and effort, commodities much prized in the I-need-it-yesterday world of research. "It's not a case of coming to the end of your one-on-ones or focus groups and waiting for the report and then waiting for a new version of the creative. You can walk out the door with the new version in your hand."

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